In Spain there’s provinces where no DS children have been born in more than one decade; one of them used to have the highest rates of DS in the country. How come?
Easy: they get aborted.
Strictly speaking this is illegal, as the first amniocentesis (sp?) often gets run after the third month (1) and abortion in Spain is theoretically only legal during the first trimester, but there’s a lot of “grandfathered” abortions… either the, how to put this, reason to get an abortion comes up after the third trimester or there’s some sort of judge’s decision required (2) which even if speedy takes a while. Sometimes pregnancy dates get manipulated, sometimes they’re kept as originally but, like I said, the abortion itself is grandfathered.
40 years ago, having a child with DS was viewed as “a damn problem,” “a case of bad luck” - now people with an DS child find themselves being accosted by strangers on the street either berating them for “putting such a burden on society” and “making your child go through this”, or by strangers congratulating them on “placing the holiness of life above their own comfort.”
1: it should be earlier but it’s a “routine procedure” therefore it tends to get bumped back in favor of people with “urgent stuff”
2: I remember a case, maybe 9 or 10 years ago, of a hospital and later a judge in Saragossa refusing a girl’s abortion because the complaint filed with the police was for “estupro” and not for “violación”; the law states abortion is legal in case of “violación”. Of course the question of why is a “statutory rape (in this case by your own father)” not an acceptable reason to abort, while rape by a stranger would be, was asked very loudly; heck, a lot of people were asking how come the un-paternal father hadn’t been run out of town by a mob with pitchforks and offering to bring their own pitchforks. The question of why statutory rape carried lower penalties than rape after the previous reform of the Criminal Code had hardened penalties for rape but not for statutory rape also came to the table. :smack: Spanish lawmakers with a huge wet trout :smack: The girl did finally get her abortion but they had to change the police report.
On the hijack and getting attached, my family’s tree, which has been dutifully kept up since the “blood tests” of Philip V, would only get people added once they reached 2 years of age. My born-dead female cousins aren’t listed; my lasted-one-month second cousin is, because the uncle now keeping the tree reckoned it was about bloody time we started counting everybody.
That’s me. My mom tried for almost 20 years to get pregnant, then finally gave up after spontaneously aborting 2 fetuses [one @ 5 mos, one @ 3] and being told she couldn’t carry a baby to term.
She was 43 when she got preggers with me and all through her pregnancy was told I’d probably be a Down’s baby as a woman ‘of her age’ usually did. Hell, one of the doctors she went to—and immediately told to take a flying one—told her I was a tumor and not a baby. And this was in 1968, folks.
I could have sworn I read something about mothers of Downs babies fearing that their “culture” was disappearing with the prevalence of pre-natal testing but I’ll be damned if I can find anything about it.
I find it interesting that most Down Syndrome babies are born to young mothers. I guess it makes sense because they don’t get the testing but, being 38 and just having had a baby, I really thought of it more as an older mother issue.
I’ve recently read it more exactly as 92%, though of course that is only of cases diagnosed before birth. I do remember seeing quite a few more Down’s children when I was a kid. It’s rare now. (Yes, I find this to be completely horrifying.)
100+ years ago, it’s my understanding that some babies who were obviously severely handicapped at birth were simply left alone in a room to die. This would be homebirths, I suppose. I don’t know how common it was.
I also think the point above about the lack of medical care is a good one–quite a few children with DS would not survive more than a year or two without modern medical care. Even so, I think one sees fewer children with DS now than was common 50 or 100 years ago.
My grandmother was 50 when she had her last child. My Aunt and my older Brother were born 6 weeks apart. After 6 attempts my grands finally had a son 2 years previously. Aunty was “menopause”.
MRW
I’m cancer. No, that’s not my sign of the zodiac. You see, a regular tumor doesn’t have arms and legs, cancers are called “crab” because they have arms and legs as do I. I was a miracle, Middlebro 6 years later was confirmation that the docs who’d been telling Mom she was sterile should have kept their heads off the drugs cabinet…
Grandma’s description of Uncle Doctor calling Mom’s Obgyn on the phone after hearing that the Obgyn wanted to scrape the tumor off right there (the nurse convinced him to do a pregnancy test first), then ripping him up one side and down the other was amazing. “He used words a lady does not know, but I shall tell you that the mildest ones were ‘murdering butcher’.”
This bothers me when they mention age and DS. While it is true that an older woman is more likely to have a child with DS, many more younger than older women give birth. So even though the younger moms are less likely to have a baby with DS, since there are way more of them than of older moms, there are more kids with DS born out of those younger moms. A bit confusing, I guess. I know it was better explained in my genetics textbook in college. And wiki backs me up (man, I don’t like it much but it is quick reference).And the source webpage for that information
The two kids I know with DS (one was a friend’s brother who passed away a few years ago at 19, the other one is my cousin) were born out of young (less than 30 years) mothers. Who went on and had more kids that were normal, even after they were older than 30. Both of them, btw, had testing done beforehand, and knew that they were going to have a baby with DS before giving birth to it. I’m not sure in the case of my friend’s, but at least for my first cousin, abortion was not considered.
My mom told me about a friend of hers and they were expecting their first babies at around the same time. They shopped for baby stuff together and exchanged stories and eagerly anticipated the Big Day.
Well, the big day came and went with the birth of my older brother. My mother was waiting for the call from her friend about her baby’s birth. A month or so passed and my mom called her and learned that her friend’s baby was born with Downs and other physical problems. My mom said she cried and cried for her friend because you just didn’t talk about the unfortunate births back in those days. It simply wasn’t done.
The Marklund home was founded with the birth of her friend’s baby.
Doctors used to recommend families who’d had a DS child to try for another one. They’d found that the likelyhood of a repeat was very low and it made the parents feel less guilty (having a younger non-DS sibling shows that the DS one doesn’t have it because the parents were having sex “too old” or somesuch).
Whether this has actually produced articles in peer-reviewed journals, I don’t know; all I know is the logic behind the recommendation.
My mother didn’t think I was menopause because she was still regular when she got pregnant with me, but I was the last egg to drop - her period never started again after she had me (at 37). I think that makes me kinda special.
I’ve never heard of it. In the case of both my friend parents’ and my cousin’s, I don’t think any doctor had to tell them anything. I know at least for my cousin (mom to my DS cousin), having a family was and is important to her. She currently has 4 girls (and I think the birth explosion has finally stopped in that household), only the first one (the one she had when she was youngest) with DS, and the second one with spina bifida (mild and corrected).
This is interesting. I wonder whether generally speaking, a reason for more DS births to young mothers may be for a couple of reasons: a) not getting tested; b) romantic ideas about caring for a child; c) someone else is going to support the baby (the mother’s parents) so the mother doesn’t consider the ramifications as seriously.
You see more DS in younger mothers than in older ones, and it has always been that way, due to the increased fertility of that younger age group compared to the older one.
For example (fudging numbers a bit to make calculations more easy): A woman over 40 has a 1 in 50 chance of having a kid with DS. A woman between 20-30 has a 1 in 2000 chance. There is a region where 4000 babies are born from mothers 20-30, but only 50 babies are born out of women later than 40. Going by odds, if there are DS cases, it will be more likely to be from younger women (2) than from older (1).
I’m not sure what is the cutoff age for doing amniocentesis (I hope someone with current knowledge comes along). I also don’t know if there are other prenatal routine tests (ultrasound, for example) that may show something is not right and prompt further testing. In the case of my cousin, I think they knew the baby was going to have DS before it was born, and they were prepared to love her and raise her, and do as much as they could to make her as independent as possible. And quite a cute lively imp she has become!
Dare we speculate on how long it will be before the Duggars have a DS baby? They’re on what, 18 or 19 now? And with their Quiverful philosophy, not likely to stop now.
I guess I should not have said “more births”, I meant a higher proportion of DS conceptions may result in births. I guess another reason may be they are just healthier mothers.
Well, an amniocentesis isn’t a risk free test - it’s fairly safe but does carry some risks, so a lot of people don’t opt to have one (some of whom I’m sure don’t want to have one because they don’t want to know or have decided to raise a Down’s baby anyway) and I’m sure it isn’t a test they do without some specific need. They did it for my mom because she was 38 and the risk of Down’s was higher - my parents would indeed have chosen to abort me had I had a chromosomal disorder.
On the subject of the D.S. community, my first paying job (outside of family stuff) was at a group home for the retarded in Montgomery. It started when a 60 year old lady, Mrs. McInnis, who had a teenaged D.S. son (Hal, one of the loveliest and funniest human beings I have ever had the pleasure of knowing- he lived at the group home and contrary to the notions some may think of D.S. people he had a wicked and mischievous sense of humor) formed basically a “baby sitting” ring with other D.S. mothers, and it grew from there into a huge organization with two campuses, numerous contracts from various employers, and homes all over the city. (They had long since grown to encompass more than just D.S…)
A very morbid but odd and true fact I probably shouldn’t mention about the adults I’ve known with D.S. who have died: in their coffins, they did not look retarded. Hal (who lived into his 50s) looked a lot like Truman Capote, while a lady I knew named Shirley looked like a pudgy elderly housewife and a neighbor’s son named Kenny looked about like Randy (Ethan Supplee) from My Name is Earl during the open casket visitations.
A friend who manages a home for retarded adults in metro-Atlanta (at the loopiest organization I’ve ever heard of- I want to smack his nutty managers for their bizarre notions on the abilities of the mentally retardated, but that’s another story) has a resident with Downs Syndrome who is about 60 years old and in relatively good health (some problems, but gets around mostly unaided). That was once unheard of, but they are living much longer now. This guy is completely bald (“looks like he shaves his head” bald), reads on about a second grade level, and writes poetry! (Again on about a second grade level, but that he can write at all is incredible.)
Some gossip: the D.S. guy, “Billy”, was the son of a very wealthy and evidently not particularly sweet family who left a multimillion dollar estate. The mother was afraid that her other kids would essentially forget Billy existed and never take care of him beyond paying for a group home, so she left Billy the bulk of her estate (which was considerable) in trust with airtight stipulations about how much time the family must spend with him, proof his birthday and Christmas are always spent with family, etc., until the final disbursement of the estate (which was set for a specific date in the future by which Billy will probably have died of natural causes). By all accounts the old lady’s will was very barbed, straightforward (“You WILL spend time with your brother”), and disinherits any who attempt to challenge it.
